(January 5, 2011, Column 3)
By Donald H. Harrison
San Diego and Israel
Invitations are going out on Facebook from Tibi Zohar and other active members of the Jewish community to the Balboa Park demonstration planned by Israel advocates to counter another one planned by Palestinians and leftists in behalf of the terrorist Hamas government in Gaza. … The pro-Israel group plans to gather at the big Moreton Bay fig tree between the Natural History Museum and Spanish Village at 3 p.m this Sunday. From there, the group will proceed to the large fountain on the other side of the Natural History Museum near Park Boulevard.
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The House of Israel in Balboa Park has been looking, well, like a forgotten exhibit area, filled with materials that relate to a bygone Israel rather than to the modern, vibrant country that is a world leader in many technological fields. But all that is soon to change. The cottage will be undergoing interior renovations, beginning Monday, January 10. Yaron Farzan quips that the remodeling has been so long in coming, “we think the Mashiyah is coming to the grand re-opening event.” Via Facebook, he has invited HOI supporters to come to the 2 p.m. open house this Sunday to take a last look at the old-version Cottage. The interior renovations will take approximately eight weeks to complete . In the meantime, on Sunday, January 23, HOI volunteers will be honored at the nearby Hall of Nations….
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Some of the top leadership of the Sha’ar Hanegev municipality will be coming to San Diego on a six-day visit in conjunction with the Jewish Federation’s 75th anniversary celebration on Saturday, Jan. 15, at the Bayside Hilton. The delegation will include Mayor Alon Schuster and his wife Lizi, Sha’ar Hanegev High School principal Aharale Rothstein, and Oded Plut, strategic planner for the municipality which is the partnership region for the Jewish Federation. Shoshi Bogoch, the Israeli shlicha stationed at the Federation, says the delegation will have a busy schedule, meeting with Federation leadership, Israel advocacy organizations, representatives of communal institutions with programs in Sha’ar Hanegev, and with potential donors. …. The speaker at the Federation’s annual dinner will be Avram Infeld, a South African-born Israeli who heads the Hillel movement and is known as an educational innovator. Honorees will be the past presidents of the Jewish Federation. Dinner co-chairs are Claire and David Ellman, Sylvia and David Geffen, Ashley and Ryan Stone, and Laura and Brian Tauber.
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Eileen Wingard, her son Dan Wingard, daughter Harriet Wingard and Harriet’s husband, Danny Koch, returned from a trip to Israel, but often it seemed as if they were actually in San Diego. At the Technion, they found that the Visitors’ Center was located next to the Jacobs Plaza, named for Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs and his wife, Joan. The other Qualcomm co-founder, Dr. Andrew Viterbi, was lecturing at the Technion that week; Sondra and Dr. Robert Berk were visiting that day; and they passed a statue of San Diegan, Bob Shillman, sitting with his cat on a bench. Eileen only a few weeks earlier had been to Shillman’s Fairbanks Ranch home to hear a recital by America-Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship recipients.
Several days later, Wingard, a retired violinist with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, and family were hosted at the Kfar Saba home of Yoav Talmi and his wife Er’ella. Yoav was Wingard’s former conductor of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra. The San Diegans also had dinner with Jacob and Chaya Goldberg. Jacob lectures regularly in San Diego on Israel’s politics and foreign policy. His next series at the Lawrence Family JCC is scheduled for April 4, 5, & 6. At the Goldberg’s, they saw Ella and Isaac Malkin, former residents of San Diego when these Russian natives came from Israel three decades ago. Now, Isaac teaches violin at the Manhattan School of Music.
On a sadder note, during their tour of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, they saw the symbolic tilted tree monument in front of the student cafeteria where plaques memorialized nine student victims of a 2002 terrorist bombing, including San Diegan Marla Bennett, daughter of Michael and Linda Bennett. .They lunched at the university with Biblical Scholar Shalom Paul, head of the Dead Sea Scroll Society, who also has lectured on several occasions in San Diego.
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American Jewish stories
Louis Rose (1807-1888). San Diego’s first Jewish settler, will finally get a plaque in his honor at the area of Liberty Station (formerly known as San Diego Naval Training Center) at the foot of Womble Road. Since 2004—the 350th anniversary of Jewish settlement in San Diego—that spot along the course of the Boat Channel leading into San Diego Bay has officially been designated by the City of San Diego as Louis Rose Point. NTC lies partially within Rose’s township site of Roseville, now part of Point Loma. Rose was among the earliest San Diegans to recognize that to attract commerce the city should move its downtown from Old Town to San Diego Bay … Norman Greene, the new president of the Louis Rose Society for the Preservation of Jewish History, said a ceremony to unveil the plaque has been tentatively scheduled on Rose’s 204th birthday at 10 a.m. Thursday, March 24, at the Point. … Greene is the society’s fourth president, succeeding History Professors Lawrence Baron and JoEllyn Zollman and yours truly. Dan Schaffer, who used to write a column for the San Diego Jewish Times, is a new member of the organization’s 8-member executive board, which includes those present and past presidents, and Janet Esser, Gerry Greber and Arlette Smith.
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Speaking of Zollman, she, former Agency for Jewish Education Director Alan Rusonik and AJE Adult Education Director Noah Hadas are teaming up to give a Melton Scholars course on “Jews in America,” focusing on our people’s experiences as insiders and outsiders. To be conducted on Tuesday mornings and evenings at the Lawrence Family JCC. Wednesday evenings at Temple Solel in Encinitas, and Thursday afternoon at Carlsbad’s Dove Library, Feb. 8 through April 13, the ten-week course plans to examine such questions as the “Three-Generation Hypothesis” (that immigrant parents and children forget the old country, but grandchildren want to learn about it); “Jews as Creators of American Culture;” “Antisemitism and the Holocaust”; “Zionism and the State of Israel as Factors in American Jewish Identity;” “The Civil Rights Movement: A Case Study of Jewish Ethics in Action” “American Jewish Fiction” and “The Future of Jewish Identity in America.” Fee for the course is $200, with more information available via the Agency for Jewish Education at (858) 268-9200.
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Author, Author
San Diego and Israel
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San Diego City College Humanities Prof. Laurel Corona, who contributes regularly to San Diego Jewish World, has been booked as a guest lecturer in October 2010 by Silverseas Cruises on back-to-back voyages between the Iberian Peninsula and Greece. For Corona, the voyages will involve port calls in countries that have been the setting for two of her published books and for one book now in progress. The Four Seasons, http://www.laurelcorona.com/fourseasons.php published in 2008, won the Theodor S. Geisel Award for Book of the Year at the San Diego Book Awards, and was set in Italy. Her second novel, Penelope’s Daughter based on Homer’s Odyssey, was released in October 2010, and is set in Greece. Her fourth novel, tentatively titled The Shape of the World, is a multi-generational saga about the last decades of Jewish presence in Spain before the 1492 expulsion. It will be marketed sometime this spring for publication in 2012. And what about her third novel? Well, it’s set in France, where the cruise isn’t going. Nevertheless, Finding Emilie will be out this April from Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books. Corona says “the novel tells the story of the high-living, unconventional, and ultimately tragic French Enlightenment aristocrat Emilie du Châtelet, whose brilliant work in mathematics and physics transformed French science.” …
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Michael Parrish, a UCLA history professor who wrote a biography of attorney Joseph L. Rauh Jr., a founder of Americans for Democratic Action, will give a San Diego History Center lecture on Rauh’s life at the Casa de Balboa in Balboa Park from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., Thursday, January 13. If you’d like to bone up for his lecture, Rauh gave this oral interview to the Harry S Truman presidential library.
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Amelia Glaser, UCSD literature professor, will speak at Congregation Dor Hadash on February 11 at 7:30p.m. on “American leftist Yiddish poets from the 1930s.” Dr. Glaser has published on topics such as Isaac Babel and Peretz Markish, and has translated many poems and stories into English from Russian, Yiddish, and Italian.
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William Propp, UCSD religion professor and author of the Anchor Commentary on the Book of Exodus, will deliver the Mandelbaum Family Lecture at 10:30 a.m., Wednesday, Jan. 19, at the Coronado Library on the subject “Hard Women and Soft Men in the Hebrew Bible.” More information is available from the Agency for Jewish Education at (858) 268-9200.
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Gloria Ross is in the middle of her first one-year term as president of the San Diego State University Women’s Association. The group raises scholarship money for women students who might not otherwise be able to stay in school. Typically, she says, the scholarships are no less than $3,000. Recently one of three recipients was the daughter of Chinese immigrants, who is the first member of her family to attend university. She hopes to be a doctor. Doesn’t this sound like a familiar story to our Jewish ears?
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. If you have a personal or institutional item you’d like to share, contact him at (619) 265-0808 or sdheritage@cox.net